Navarro: Trump distributed bogus election fraud research to ‘every’ Congressional Republican
When the 2020 election didn’t go Trump’s way, Peter Navarro did something dangerous. He began to do his own research.
Navarro, an economist whom Donald Trump tapped to lead his trade war against China, didn’t stay in his lane at the White House. He’d already inserted himself in the administration’s botched pandemic response, pushing the unproven hypothesis that Covid-19 escaped from a Wuhan lab. And after the 2020 vote, Navarro began compiling a series of inflammatory dossiers on the outcome — with names like “The Immaculate Deception,” “The Art of the Steal,” and “Yes, Trump Won” — pushing the Big Lie that the election was stolen.
Navarro’s reports include debunked allegations of “outright voter fraud” across six battleground states, including “the large-scale manufacturing of fake ballots, bribery, and dead voters” as well as roundly discredited conspiracy theories alleging sordid connections between voting machine companies, a former Venezuelan dictator, the Clinton Foundation, and George Soros. [Continue reading…]
The storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6 has been denounced by the White House, the FBI and the Justice Department as an act of domestic terrorism, but one year after the insurrection, prosecutors have yet to ask judges to impose the harsher sentences federal law recommends for defendants motivated by politics.
Instead, even as some judges have publicly debated whether the charges against Jan. 6 defendants qualify as “crimes of terrorism,” prosecutors have repeatedly pulled back on tougher sentences, citing unspecified “facts and circumstances.”
The so-called sentencing enhancement for terrorism crimes was created as a result of legislation Congress passed following the 1993 bombing in a parking garage at the World Trade Center. The provision initially applied only to crimes linked to international terrorism, but after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, Congress moved to expand the enhancement to cover terrorism inspired purely by domestic causes. [Continue reading…]